Friday, January 16, 2015

I fought the lime and the, LIME won.

In a quick break from Japan-prep-talk, today I bring you this stupid story:

If you have any familiarity with legit Mexican cuisine, you may be familiar with limes.
It is not uncommon in Mexico to put a bit of lime juice on EVERYTHING, and it's a habit that The Mister and I whole-heartedly adopted after living in Monterrey. We always have a small bag of limes on hand for whatever dish we decide needs a little extra zing. Truly it's delicious. Give 'er a try!

I know this is supposed to be a joke, but I would legitimately try lime juice on everything pictured in this gif that is a real food for people.

Want a free, easy brunch recipe? Here you go:

2 hard boiled eggs, diced.

1/2 Avacado, also diced.

Lime Juice.

salt and pepper to taste.

It's amazing, I promise. Also a bit fatty. But the good kind of fatty. Or something. Whatever, I like it.

About a week or so before Christmas I was making said brunch for myself. I took out my lime to slice, and about three seconds later I was looking at the knife as it sat; not on the cutting board between two lime-halves, but more like deep in the middle of the pointer finger on my left hand.
It didn't so much hurt (at that point) as it was just really startling to see a knife IN my finger.

Here's what I want to know about YOU, dear reader:

How do you react to accidental self-harm?

Tell me in the comments!

I've never been a fan of knives. They give me the heebie-jeebies. My anxiety almost always sees a knife and immediately takes my imagination to the worst possible scenario of what could happen while said knife is in my line of sight.

I anxiously argue with The Mister at least once a week over whether he needs to use the sharp knife when he could use a butter knife for cutting things.

When I was in college, I took a printmaking class (who am I kidding, I took ALL the printmaking classes; Herr-Professor-Taylor-Sir for LYFE!*) and one of our projects included linoleum carving.

linoleum cutting tool of choice.

We got about a thousand heavy-handed reminders from our prof to always make sure we're cutting AWAY from ourselves with the tool, only to watch the girl sitting next to me accidentally jam that damn thing straight into her lower-thumb-meat. I'm pretty sure I silent screamed I was so upset. She just calmly asked to be excused from class, but I was traumatized.

Somewhere in The Mister's data files, there's a video of him convincing his new girlfriend to take a video of him while he tries out his new sushi-knife, even though she's pretty adamant about being uncomfortable with such a sharp knife around. He pretends to cut off his thumb as a "joke," and the video ends with the camera begin thrown onto the counter so I could panic properly by yelling every swear word I knew and running far away from my thumb-less future husband.

You get the point. Knives creep me out. People getting cut is a horrible visual. Knives are the most statistically probable item to cut a person. And so it's all kind of logical in a crazy sort of way.

It's not just knives, though. When I get a meager paper cut, The Mister will be the first to tell you that I go to Scarlett O'Hara level fainting drama.

Everything is ending, the world is over. Might as well start digging my grave, if I didn't believe that cremation (for me) is a far more responsible way to go into the great abyss. Stoke the coals, I guess.

Similar reactions occur for stubbing my toe or accidentally poking myself in the eye because I forgot my glasses were on top of my head and I tried to habitually push the bridge back up my nose. A horrific, painful death is clearly imminent, and nothing will ever be good again.

Then a butcher knife** slides off a lime-rind and into my finger deep enough where "stitches?" is not an out of the question reaction. And my immediate reaction?

TOTALLY FINE. NOTHING HORRIBLE OR TERRIFYING HAS HAPPENED. AT ALL.
I yelled this as I applied enough bandaids that I couldn't see the cut bleeding through the bandaids anymore. That equaled somewhere around 10 bandaids. I figured the yelling as loudly as possble made certain the powers that be would hear me and make sure my finger was actually totally fine and it wasn't going to get gangrene and start to smell and fall off during a poker game. This needed to be true especially because I don't play poker.

In the past four or five weeks, I've gone through a family size pack of bandaids. I learned that you can *kind of* decoupage a finger-nail that you've chopped mid-way through by using clear nail polish and a piece of tissue paper. But friends, I write this blog post triumphantly today because my finger is healed (mostly, it sort of looks like I have a perma-hang-nail), and the nail has grown out just enough that I can give myself a VERY lop-sided mani-cure. But it means I don't have to keep a bandaid on it anymore, because now I can't catch the cut on everything. It's exciting. Really, stop judging.

Bubba is very excited too.

Have you ever epically broken a nail? How did you deal?

*My printmaking prof was a highlight of my college career. He was a grizzly dude- if Ron Swanson had Albert Einstein hair and a passion for pottery instead of woodworking, that would be Prof. Taylor. Studio classes were required to listen to his CD of Toto's Greatest Hits on repeat, and for some reason this never made anyone dislike him, but rather it just gave us all a common bond of being millennial kids who enthusiastically knew every word to "Africa." At some point, we, as chill art students, started referring to him by only "Taylor," his last name. This is a moniker he accepted for approximately half an hour until he paused Toto and informed us stoically that we would refer to him with a title that conveyed proper respect. We couldn't decide on one title, so we gave him all the titles, and from then on he was Herr Professor Taylor Sir. He seemed to like it.**yeah, I know, butcher knife for a tiny lime is maybe a bit on the over-zealous side. But all our other knifes were dirty.